


if we get our full threescore and ten we won't pass this way again

by orphan_account



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Drama, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-26
Updated: 2014-08-26
Packaged: 2018-02-14 22:34:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2205516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was an amnesiac. He could count all he knew on his metal hand. He had one skill; he could kill. Messy, quiet, ugly, clean, secret, close, anonymous, loud kills. He’d even killed James Buchanan Barnes and he hadn’t known it until last week. His most silent murder. He’d seen the sepia-colored pictures in the museum, the short movie, and the useless discarded clothes. That man was long gone. It was his killer walking with his face, in his place, dreaming of his love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if we get our full threescore and ten we won't pass this way again

**Author's Note:**

> This is unbetaed so proceed with due caution. More chapters to come post-haste. Title from the song Dilaudid by the Mountain Goats. Would love any and all feedback!

 

Steve was wearing his father’s shoes when they first met. He remembered a boy’s ragged, dirty face and giant shoes. Something from a dream. Shoes the size of boats, he’d thought, boats made of real leather. Vast eyes the size of the cosmos. 

* * *

 

The Winter Solider was waiting. He went to the rendezvous spot, holed down in the bunker, and waited. They would come for him, even if he ran, they would find him. Anywhere he went they had eyes and ears. They would find him in hell if he had the audacity to die before they killed him. He sat on his forgetting chair, with eyes open, and his hands folded in his lap. Today he had met someone he knew. That had never happened before. He could tell, somehow, under the layers of forgetting and forgetting, that he had known that man. Not like he sometimes knew the doctors or the man giving him orders this week. He had known him like a man would know his own face in the mirror. He had known his eyes, his shocked open mouth, his strong jawline. They came in just as the scratch on his stomach stopped bleeding. _I knew him_ , he told them. They told him he had to forget him. 

* * *

 

It was a deluge every night. His sweat soaked through his shirt until he was shivering from the cold. He slept on the hard floor. He hadn’t left the room in three days. He had been awake for almost four days. They will find you, he thought, but it was getting harder to resist the door. He could walk out. The whole building was empty, all the cold floors still lit like they were waiting too, no guards anywhere. He could go through that door and no one would stop him. They would find him even if he found some dark hole to slink into. He wasn’t unfaithful, was he? He was loyal. He had always been loyal. He was good soldier. He found himself muttering under his breath. On the fourth day he bit his own tongue until he couldn’t possibly speak their words because his mouth was flooded with blood. 

* * *

 

It was the start of the Spanish Civil War and they were very young. War was very, very, far away but in a way everyday was a war. He worked at the docks whenever a ship came into harbor. It was hard for Steve to keep a job. He was thin and easily sick. In the summers it was his allergies and in the winters it was his weak lungs. More than anything he was worried about Steve’s lungs, the infections he caught easily, his hacking cough, and his voice like a whisper in the dark.  

* * *

 

He was an amnesiac. He could count all he knew on his metal hand. He had one skill; he could kill. Messy, quiet, ugly, clean, secret, close, anonymous, loud kills. He’d even killed James Buchanan Barnes and he hadn’t known it until last week. His most silent murder. He’d seen the sepia-colored pictures in the museum, the short movie, and the useless discarded clothes. That man was long gone. It was his killer walking with his face, in his place, dreaming of his love. 

* * *

 

Where are we going? Steve asked him and he said–

* * *

 

the future was a gleam in the corner of his eyes. It was metallic like his arm, it was familiar dirty cities, and unfamiliar people who never looked at him for long. They knew the predators that walked the busy streets and they knew he was more dangerous than all the ones they had met before. Belligerent men, confident women, and small children all scurried away like rabbits. He didn’t know how to laugh but he would feel a shiver of something slick pass down his spine. He found himself looking to the sky for flying cars that didn’t appear. The future was exhausting; discordant songs, cathedrals in disrepair, food and alcohol being sold for an obscene amount of money. Every corner of earth seemed suddenly to be overcrowded. He woke early, near dawn, everyday so he could walk the quiet streets. There were days when he would forget again; forget the name of the city he was in, forget the forty or so days of memories he had gathered like a handful of dust, and forget that he didn’t have a mission. He would walk until the sun rose, startle the pigeons by crouching on rooftops, and survey innocent strangers as they woke up, made coffee, woke their kids, kissed their spouses, and made breakfast. He would watch men dress themselves, young girls study for exams, cats getting fed, arguments between neighbors, and policemen strolling like there wasn’t a spider hovering over their heads. He felt his coiled body waiting to spring. Later he would be so angry at these strangers. They’d left the curtains of their windows open to let the sun in. They’d also left their lives open to the eyes of a killer like himself. In these hardened, granite, future cities, the people were soft as pin cushions. He was a sharp pin.  

* * *

 

The Winter Solider was waiting. He went to the rendezvous spot, holed down in the bunker, and waited. They would come for him, even if he ran, they would find him. Anywhere he went they had eyes and ears. They would find him in hell if he had the audacity to die before they killed him. He sat on his forgetting chair, with eyes open, and his hands folded in his lap. Today he had failed his mission. He knew what they did with failures. They would put him down like a dog. They would cut out his tongue and he would never be able to say the name that lingered on the tip– They would wipe him and send him out again. If he failed they would wipe him and send him back. Again and again and again. Until he completed his mission. _I’ll never do it_ , he thought resigned. His metal hand twitched in his lap. 

* * *

 

He knew the exact tilt of Steve’s face when he would look up to smile at him and the disconcerting downward angle when Steve had to do the same in his new body when they met in the middle of a war. He remembered calculating the precise movements that would press his lips to Steve’s. A slight bend and a small tilt. His body never learnt how to move that way.  

* * *

 

Sometimes, deep in cyrofreeze, he had these– They couldn’t really be thoughts or dreams or memories because he wasn’t supposed to have those. It was a disturbance, or a failure, that would flash before his open eyes. A bridge at night near a bright and sleeping city. A boy asleep in a hot room, thin shoulders shuddering, eyelids moving erratically in sleep. The boy’s pink open mouth. A window, blue sky, birds in formation. A sketchbook filled with funny, familiar people. A bridge on fire. A man leaping across to him. Why is it always bridges with us, he didn’t think. Couldn’t, couldn’t think.

* * *

 

He hadn’t slept today which was the fifth day he had been awake. He kept moving to the door. Sometimes he touched it, touched the metal with his warm hand, touched the bars with just his fingertips. He could slide it open. He could just slide it open slightly. He didn’t have to leave the room. He could just glance outside. He scratched the metal door with his fragile human fingernails. He was as weak there as the next man. They’d shown it to him, sometimes, when he was rebellious or stupid. It hadn’t happened in years, he thought. They would peel off his nails and he would scream. When he awoke the nails would have grown into sharp, animal claws. Once he’d woken so angry he’d scratched a doctor’s eyes straight out of his skull. It had been satisfying to burst those eyes like they were ripe fruit. He clutched his head in pain and leaned against the metal door. 

* * *

 

There were fishermen on the river. The steel mill loomed over them, menacing and immense on the horizon, a reminder of Magnitogorsk’s past and future. He fingered the postcard while contemplating the familiar view. He had a whole set of memories, like a meticulous collection of baseball cards in little plastic sleeves, that led him to the steel city near the Ural Mountains. He’d travelled from Moscow, about 1500 km on train, to sort through them as carefully as possible. 

 _What are the names of your parents?_ the man asked him.

 _Anatoli Konstantinovich Khodorovskiy and Zoya Anatolyevna Khodorovskiy, sir,_ he replied. 

 _Where were they born?_ the man was as bored of this routine as the Winter Soldier was.  

 _Brooklyn_ , he replied absently. 

There was a significant pause.

 _Where were they born, soldier?_ the man asked more carefully. 

_In Kiev, sir._

_That’s right. That’s good. Do you get along with your younger brother, Alexie?_

_We fight all the time but I love him,_ the Winter Soldier said.

_That’s right, that’s right. You love him._

* * *

 

He walked out the door and vomited right outside. They hurt my soul, he thought later, more than my body.  

* * *

 

The Winter Soldier walked the streets of Magnitogorsk, specifically the residential buildings on the right bank of the Ural river, looking for the address he’d found in old records stored in the neat cabinets of one of those Soviet era bunkers, hideouts, and cabins that still littered the Russian landscape. They were there if you knew where to look and the Soldier had an instinct for these things. An instinct for finding that one old man, that one bar, that one old whore, who knew someone who knew someone who knew something. Not everyone had forgotten the past though many had tried to forget it. 

Here he was, minutes away from possibly uncovering some part of the mystery surrounding his past, and he felt ambivalent at best. Did he want to know who he was? Didn’t everyone want, need, to know the answer to that question? When he’d first woken up and decided to pursue his origins, he’d felt determined and exhilarated at the thought of a mission. It was all he’d ever known or could remember knowing. The Soldier felt melancholy looking at the drab, grey buildings, the residences of hundreds of thousands of workers who’d spent all their years getting iron ore out of mountains and smelting it for tanks, guns, rails, ships, cars, only to run out of iron ore and years. He felt like that, like an old man, like a dry mountain. He felt like this city, a city built rapidly for a single purpose, only to exhaust all its natural resources before completion. But what did it mean to be complete, for a soldier such as himself? He wasn’t a man. Men had pasts, parents, friends, lovers, loves. They could feel incomplete, sad, lonely, He was–  

* * *

 

Bucky walked down the streets of Magnitogorsk, the residential buildings looming over him, like the ghosts of Russia-past. He wasn’t Russian, he knew that, though he could speak Russian like a native. The Winter Soldier was Russian, a Soviet creation through and through, down to his bones. The problem was that they flowed into each other, the Winter Soldier and Bucky Barnes, like a river into the ocean. The problem was figuring out who was the river and who was the ocean. That was a fucking complicated equation and Bucky had never been good at maths. 

 _I’ll teach it to you, numbskull_ , Steve said with a smile while they walked under the skyscrapers of to-morrow, tall spire shaped towers build with the maximum human ingenuity, will, skill available in their time. It was nighttime, there were no stars, but so much light.  

I _’d be so dumb without you_ , Bucky replied because it was true. He watched Steve’s face, never glanced down, or up or away. What else is there to say?

 _You’d be dumber, you mean. Don’t mince words, Buck,_ Steve told him. 

I will talk straight if you come find me. I would find the limits of my memory and push them until you could live in them without fading, Bucky thought because it was true. 

 


End file.
